Expression Analysis of <i>CBL1</i> and <i>CBL6</i> Genes in Sugarcane under Abiotic Stress

Abstract

CBLs (Calcineurin B-like proteins) is a type of special calcium sensors in plants, which plays an important role in response to stress. We derived SsCBL1 and SsCBL6 genes in sugarcane from NCBI databases. SsCBL1 gene contained a complete open reading frame of 642 bp, encoding a protein with 213 amino acids. SsCBL6 gene contained a complete open reading frame of 672 bp, encoding a protein with 223 amino acids. The structure of SsCBL1 and SsCBL6 encoding protein was analyzed by bioinformatics methods. The results showed that both of them had no transmembrane segment but contained four EF-hand domains. The phylogenetic tree analysis indicated that SsCBL1 and SsCBL6 were closely related to CBL1 and CBL6 in other plants, which were highly conservative. The results of real-time quantitative PCR demonstrated that the expression of two genes changed under low nitrogen, low phosphorus, low potassium, drought, salt and ABA stress, respectively. The expression was strongly induced by drought and salt treatments for SsCBL1 , while the expression of SsCBL6 was strongly induced by low potassium, drought and salt treatment. Real-time quantitative analysis suggested that SsCBL1 and SsCBL6 might play important regulatory roles under various stresses.